


The Fair Unknown's Guide to Court

by Reynier



Category: Arthurian Literature - Fandom, Arthurian Mythology
Genre: Fair Unknown, Gen, POV Outsider, POV Second Person, court intrigue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:28:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26015779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reynier/pseuds/Reynier
Summary: So you’ve survived the first step, which is getting to court in the first place. It’s harder than it sounds. Horrible things lurk on the roads, preying on would-be knights. Congratulations are in order.(Congratulations.)(Really, well done. I hope things continue to turn out well for you.)My submission to the Arthurianum zine for August 2020.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 26





	The Fair Unknown's Guide to Court

**Author's Note:**

> heyyyyy so this was my fic submission to the first issue of the zine Arthurianum yeet yeet yeet ever think about all the fair unknowns who didn't make it?

It’s not like the stories. I’ll tell you that much for free— whatever you think you know is not what is. Knights fight dragons, knights kill giants, knights rescue damsels. 

(What do they rescue damsels from? Other knights.)

But we won’t talk about that sort of thing. Let’s talk about you. You’re young, you’re a squire or a page or a kitchen-boy, you have some outstanding feature deeply related to your past traumas, and you don’t know who your father is. You’ve got a name, but it’s not for anyone to know. You are unknowable. I know you so well. 

Kardoel looms larger than anything you’ve ever seen in your life: it stretches out like an ocean, vast and impenetrable and full of things swimming in the dark. You clutch your sword a little tighter and wonder if this monumental fortress will guard your deeds close to its heart. On the roads people hear tales of the great adventures perpetrated by knights of the Round Table. Maybe yours will wander from town to town before long. 

(Chances are it won’t.)

When the gates swing open, two people greet you. You know this story, right? One man always lies and one always tells the truth. On the right stands Sir Gawain, dressed neatly in his habitual green doublet and friendly smile. On the left stands the seneschal Sir Kay and his brutally honest tongue. Both will offer you a glass of wine. You can only drink once. 

Inside, Karodel is another world. The rafters stretch up into infinity, dark polished wood coated with tapestries and glittering lanterns, pulling your eyes this way and that so your gaze slides off the surrounding people like a sword from a stone. When you’ve stood and gawked for long enough, Sir Gawain places his hand on your shoulder and guides you forward. Depending on your interactions at the gate, it means one of two things. His hand, carefully gloved, serves as a ballast or a reminder. Through the thin fabric you can feel his rings pressing into your arm, a half a dozen of them, made of wood and bone and cold metal. You’d have to make a lot of deals in your time here to get rings like those. Maybe that’s what you’ve come here to do, to play the politician. Don’t get too distracted by your own hands, though, or you’ll forget to watch other people’s.

“A toast to the new arrival!” calls the Queen, her head tilted just so and her eyes shrewd. She sits at the left hand of the king, poised on her throne with a statue’s smile. To her right the pride of the Britons is squeezed between wife and nephew, placid and puppetlike. Sir Gawain strides past you and slinks into the empty right-hand seat.

The hall springs into action at her words: stewards erupt into motion like a flock of startled birds; maids emerge from unseen nooks with silverware and dusters; the courtiers at the long meal-tables stand as one and regard you like you’re everything you believe you could be. It feels glorious, for that one moment. You are loved. You belong. Everyone is waiting to see all the wonderful things you will do, unknown errant. Through the haze of newness you become aware of a meal that has been laid out before you, a plate piled high with wine-soaked venison and seed bread and grape leaves in the Roman style. Behind the plate two chalices lurk. They look identical. They couldn’t be more different. 

“A gift from my Lord Seneschal, Sir Kay,” says a serving-maid who has appeared at your side from thin air, pointing at the chalice on the left. “And—” The right-hand chalice is indicated. “—from the king’s advisor, Sir Gawain. They commend you to your health.”

You drink. They watch.

“Welcome to Kardoel,” says King Arthur, and the words rub off like charcoal.

So you’ve survived the first step, which is getting to court in the first place. It’s harder than it sounds. Horrible things lurk on the roads, preying on would-be knights. Congratulations are in order.

(Congratulations.)

(Really, well done. I hope things continue to turn out well for you.)

Whatever chalice you chose that first night, you will have made enemies. If you sipped from Sir Gawain’s cup, Kay will never trust you again. He is wickedly intelligent, no matter what you may have heard of his bluster, and from this day forth he will look at you with disdain for your perceived cowardice. Conversely, if you chose the Seneschal and his kith— not his kin, everyone is kin in Kardoel, and kith and kin are not alike— Gawain and Guinevere will not hesitate to use you in whatever way they need. The only real difference between the various factions is aesthetic, and in the end they both love their king. They have to love their king. They are his family and, no matter what anyone tells you, he loves them all. That’s how they play him. 

Deep down, they love each other as well. Kardoel is built on love; a courtly kind of love, and the fighting is only in service of kindness. By the end of your time here you, like me, will probably find yourself wishing that the king had not pulled a  _ sword  _ from a stone. Anything else would have been better. A book, a staff, a crown. But not a sword. He was so young and so innocent and did not know that swords should stay in the stones that trap them, because someone put them there in the first place. 

King Arthur is not the only knight to have achieved this particular feat, you know. Well, you probably don’t. People don’t talk about Galahad anymore. At any rate, Sir Lancelot has his sword now. 

I will advise you to stay away from Sir Lancelot, fair unknown. He came to court just like you, with no name, but unlike you he bore a ring that let him see truth from falsehood. His mother gave it to him, he says, with a quiet little smile and a shrug of his shoulders as if to indicate it’s no large matter. But in the court of pretty words, there is no more dangerous ability than to see the sharp angles of the real world. 

And for all I will warn you about the sentinels at the gate, in the end you will fall into some political orbit, and there is nothing to be done about that. But you can keep clear of Sir Lancelot, if you are very careful. He will be gentle, and kind, and will always be there if you need him, and will cut your throat or gouge out your eyes or break your neck if the idiosyncrasies of fortune put you in his path. 

At the end, Guinevere will arrive. She will stand by your grave when you fall— however you fall, at the hands of a friend or an enemy or whatever waits at the last turn of your quest— and she will place violets and lilies on your grave. Even if no one else cares that you die, she will be there. She was buffeted by the winds and tied like a hawk with the jesses of marriage, beyond her control, and it is hard to hate her for her adaptive cruelty. Maybe you will turn out like her. 

Before you continue on your way I would like to tell you a story. A very long time ago there was a young boy who did not know his parentage. He lived on a farm at the end of the world and thought about the father-shaped shadow that stood over him whenever he asked to learn sword-fighting. And one day the crown came crashing up to his door with a leering grin and parentage aplenty, and with it came family. There were good things about family. They stood behind him and held him up when he stumbled, their swords and words next to his, their grins in his ear and hands pulling him back, keeping him in line and tossing him from danger to danger. And the good trickled into bad, leeching all the pride from his work, replacing people with politics and politics with power, always power, always about who had it and how they kept it. Some of them were born to power, and traded in it because it had weaned them off of milk. Some of them grasped at it because they’d never had it young. And then there was him, caught in the middle of the spider’s nest, trying to build something beyond politics and power. 

But for him it all started with a sword, and everyone ends like that as well. You will. If you want my advice— my  _ real  _ advice— you should leave and go back to wherever you came from. Love your brothers before they rot. Tend to your sheep. If you see any magic swords in magic stones, leave them where they are. 

That’s what I wish I had done. 


End file.
